Maya Lin Art Quotations

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.

You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.

I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.

In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.

I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.

How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It's more evident now.

Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.

I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.

I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.

Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.

I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.

You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.

Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid.

When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.

A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.

An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.